Imperium 42: DaveV doesn't panic

[DaveV]

By way of introduction, I have a hard time documenting my games. Popping back and forth between the game and notepad really kills the immersion, and thereby the fun, of the game (not to mention my new computer has the function keys laid out differently and I kept hitting Ctrl-F9 and crashing the game instead of Ctrl-F10 to release the mouse) . Notes on paper are even worse. This time, I went with a slew of screenshots, but probably not as many as I needed.

I expanded without AI contact until I met the Darloks and Klackons in quick succession:



In 2371, the Newsdroid reported that I was #1 in population, which is rare enough that I deemed it worth a screenshot:



State of the known universe in 2400:













Tech steal in 2401:



I stole a *lot* of techs, using my usual algorithm of stealing computer tech if available and then trying to choose what I needed. This is the only one I where took a screenshot, though.

Peace in our time:



The first election came in 2428, allowing me to gain some brownie points with the Vogons:



I had to abstain in 2450 and 2475, but didn't have to worry much.





By 2475, I had researched Controlled Radiated and colonized the Rich and Ultra Rich planets I'd been coveting.



State of the universe in 2500:























You can see that I'm about to lose Ryoun (the Steppe world due north of the homeworld) to the Sakkra. They had no problem taking out my missile bases, my fleet couldn't contest them, and they had better ground attack tech.

In my usual style, I kind of twiddled my thumbs and stole techs for 50 turns.







The Alkaris and Darloks both had bad shields and missiles, so I invaded two of each of their worlds, greatly increasing my population and giving me a nice boost in tech.



With Subspace Teleporters in hand, I was ready to go after the Guardian in 2477:







Game over. Endgame state of the universe:

[shallow_thought]

Wow, your AI opponents ended up in a completely different configuration to mine or Sullla's (or Thrawn's, but that because he started killing them much earlier!). 

Nice kill, with what looked like just about enough there...

I actually find that documenting what I'm doing helps me play - taking notes of planned tech steals, hoped for tech path etc. although the context switching is a pain, Oh, and that CTRL+F9 / CTRL+F10 thing: . Thank kyrub for auto-saves.

[DaveV]

CTRL+F10: Open the DosBox config file and change "autolock=true" to "=false". You'll be reborn

Very nice. Wish I'd known about that feature ten (fifteen?) years ago.

[Sullla]

Yes, very different looking game from the AIs as compared to what shallow_thought and I saw. As a form of what hopefully comes across as constructive criticism, this game felt rather passive to me. Maybe it's the reporting style, but it appears as though you were just sitting back and teching with no particular goal in mind for most of this game. That's fine when the player has a large and uncontested group of planets like this map did, but it's unlikely to work as well on less favorable maps. And while I don't try to optimize to the same degree as thrawn does, having so many planets short of max population and factories in 2500 feels wasteful, as does having 7 missile bases on Ultra Poor Stalaz in the far southwest corner... on a planet with only 86 factories. Was this a case of firing and forgetting the sliders (?)

For what it's worth, I take all my screenshots by using PrintScreen and then Alt-Tabbing out of DosBox to paste into an imaging program. It's always seemed to work across many games across many different years.

[DaveV]

...this game felt rather passive to me...

Was this a case of firing and forgetting the sliders (?)

You've very accurately put your finger on my two greatest weaknesses. My job requires a lot of attention to detail, and I play games to relax, so I think I'll always be less of a micromanager than most people here. On the other hand, it's more fun to win than to lose, so I'm still trying to find the balance between obsessive micromanagement and thoughtlessly whacking the next turn button.

[RefSteel]

You've very accurately put your finger on my two greatest weaknesses. My job requires a lot of attention to detail, and I play games to relax, so I think I'll always be less of a micromanager than most people here. On the other hand, it's more fun to win than to lose, so I'm still trying to find the balance between obsessive micromanagement and thoughtlessly whacking the next turn button.

This is actually really interesting to me. My job at the library does require a lot of attention to certain details, but is much less focused on that. (At the reference desk, the single most important skill is the ability to figure out what a patron is actually trying to find or learn, sometimes in spite of language barriers. The classic example, but by no means the only one, is when patrons have no idea what they want themselves, and are asking me to recommend a book that they'll like. Doing this well means asking a lot of questions and being a good listener.) When I play Orion, one of the reasons it takes me a long time (the biggest one being that I don't have a lot of time in which I can actually play a game) is that I like to check in on every one of my planets every turn even when there's no real advantage to be gained, just to keep myself familiar with them and make sure I understand what everyone (heh - all the imaginary Mrrshans) in the empire is doing and why. On the other hand, two things I love about Orion are that this still doesn't take that much time even when an empire gets large - and best of all, when there's a big strategic goal toward which I'm working, and I'm impatient to see how it plays out, I can skip a lot of micro completely without any real harm to my empire.

In any case, great job on the victory! I liked the appearance of taking out the Guardian just by the skin of your teeth when in fact it looks like the attack was long and carefully planned to just succeed!